“VitalSite is the right CMS for our system. For our team size, Geonetric’s support and their VitalSite proprietary system is the perfect fit. It’s a lot easier, and a lot faster to make changes to our site.”
Former Digital Platform Manager
Tower Health
When Reading Hospital kicked off their project with Geonetric in early 2017, their web steering committee had simple goals in mind: Align all providers with the health system, improve the patient and family experience on the web, and enhance the content and search functionality of their site with a more flexible content management system (CMS).
Rebuilding Reading Hospital
Before Tower Health was born, Reading Hospital set out to unite their own hospitals and medical group under a Reading Health brand.
Their site, while responsive, wasn’t structured in a way that resonated with visitors. Google Analytics revealed high bounce rates between pages as people struggled to find what they needed. Internal stakeholders also agreed the site felt click-heavy. Many of the most-visited services, in fact, were not properly represented on the site.
In addition, Reading Hospital’s previous CMS wasn’t flexible. The homepage felt cluttered, the web steering committee said, with little space to promote priority news or events.
Geonetric responded by creating a solid site navigation and flexible, brand-centered design to meet the goals of audiences and stakeholders. A site-wide content blueprint led recommendations to improve, archive, or migrate content to the new CMS. Seven priority service lines, as well as the medical group’s section, all received new patient-focused content that seamlessly integrations engaging calls-to-actions that inspire conversions.
Making Room for Improvements
Reading Hospital wanted the new site to be not only a “progressive design,” but the website of tomorrow, not today. That means it needed some improvements that hadn’t been prioritized on their previous site.
To connect patients with health-related information, Reading Hospital integrated Staywell Health Library content throughout their new site. Cross-linking service line content to specific condition or treatment pages in Staywell help answer visitor questions and build strong connections between similar content.
The Reading Hospital team also used Echo for their event management and didn’t want to lose the foundation they’d built. Geonetric integrated with Echo to feed into VitalSite’s Calendar & Events module, promoting related events throughout service line pages and location profiles.
A Turnkey Website for a New System
All of these enhancements gave the system room to grow.
Nearing the launch in June 2017, web platform manager Christy Laub found out Reading Health was about to get a lot bigger with the purchase of five area hospitals – and the organization was going to rebrand as Tower Health.
The already-developed flexible templates created for Reading Health were a perfect fit for Tower Health. Each hospital was given an information architecture to map content from the old sites to their new homes.
And like the migration and content improvements for Reading Hospital’s launch, Geonetric was ready and waiting to assist, migrating around 1,000 physicians from the community hospitals to VitalSite’s Provider Directory.
Lower Bounce Rate, Higher Engagement
While there aren’t metrics from the community hospitals, and Tower Health’s brand website is brand new, Reading Hospital has reaped rewards from its redesign.
Reading Hospital has decreased bounce rate and improved engagement, from 1.93 pages per session to 2.39. Traffic to their maternity service line has doubled, with other service lines seeing huge improvements in site visits.
Their visitors also engage regularly with the Patients & Families section, where users can find information about visiting Reading Hospital. What formerly was a 75 percent bounce rate has dropped to just 37 percent.
Flexible CMS and Web Design Guides New Health System Brand
